On Jul 27, 2015, at 1:07 PM, John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com>
wrote:
It probably qualifies me for Luddite status, but I've
often wondered whether the quality of our meetings would be
improved if we gave the chairs, scribes, etc. wired connections
and then got rid of WiFi in the meeting rooms.
It’s not addressing the problem. People who are active participants in
working groups still wind up reading email while they wait for redundant
presentations about documents they’ve read to finish, and then they get up and
talk at the mic, along with all the people who didn’t read the draft but got
enough of a vague idea out of the presentation that they feel okay about
commenting on it.
Chairs agree to allow ten-minute presentations about documents that aren’t
working group work items and aren’t likely to be, and then all the people in
the room who expensively flew to IETF to get work done sit and read email or
look at LOLcats for those ten minutes, and nobody comes up to the mic.
And of course some working groups take on so much work that no single
individual is interested in all the presentations, and those who aren’t read
email while they wait for the next presentation.
The right way to address this problem is speaker training, active chairing, and
the IESG not approving catch-all working groups, not punishing well-meaning,
jet-lagged participants by making them listen to presentations they aren’t
interested in.
I don’t mean to say that what you are talking about isn’t a problem, by the
way. Unfortunately I have found myself in a meeting realizing that I let
myself get too distracted by an email conversation and missed something
important. However, there is a reason that this happened, and it’s not that
I’m in the meeting to read email.